This is from the comment string found here…

http://www.godlessblogger.com/2010/08/01/truly-intelligent-design-pic/#comment-71081708

“Regardless, where do you come by this information? Is there a poll or study that you could share with us or is this your impression?”

A poll or study on what the country would look like without sports programs in education? It would be speculation and thus does not exist as a study. I could just as easily ask you to find me a study that talks about what it would be like if velociraptors were suddenly as common as wild deer. Would the lack of such a study make a claim about such an alternate world being bloody and dangerous less apt? (Would Jurassic park count as a study?)

Clearly, they don’t teach debate in your schools.

“I know and have known plenty of kids that have chosen sports and education.”

Nor do they teach the scientific method it seems. Note: Your entire life is not a representative sample. I am not speaking in absolutes I am speaking in generalities and trends. Your entire life could be populated by examples which may appear counter to my assertions, that does not mean my assertions are proven false. Ask any political atheist about the difficulty of proving a negative, and the correct placement of the burden of proof.

“I was the starting outside linebacker for my high school and played chess.”

Here we go again with the argument from personal experience. I suppose then if one guy in Nebraska informs me that he spoke to god last night and god says I should pay him, then obviously god both exists and wants me to pay this man. Now you’re just bolstering my first point. I’m not going to get bogged down in a memory war about what you may or may not have been in school.

But I will say this. Not many nerds are line backers, neither the long standing version or even the hair gel male model with glasses version of today, now that technology openly equals money and the SciFi predictions are popping up as fact left and right.

“I never thought anything about it.”

So we’ve established that you are oblivious. You probably never thought about it for the same reason people born with trust funds don’t think about money.

“These aren’t necessarily in opposition as you seem to think they are.”

You are living in a dream world. The only reason they aren’t in opposition now (maybe) is because “nerd” has become mainstream as I just explained. Because nerds now mean money and cool technology and an obvious corner on the future. (Old nerds are now being called aspie kids, so it went from being weird to being a mental illness in need of curing. Like how rebels, despite being required for a society’s long term growth, now have Oppositional Defiance Disorder.) To claim there is no dichotomy between those that favor the mind over the body is hopeless self indulgent wishful thinking.

A huge facet of the human condition (another thing your drone mills train children to never even think about) is the fact that we are an intellect, an emergent intelligence literally printed on an ape. Our brain is literally a layered map of our evolutionary past. The NEO in neo cortex means new. Prior to intelligence the body was everything. Intelligence stands opposed to the body. (A 3 pound brain being cheaper in terms of food energy than 500 pounds of muscle) And in time we will shed it. Sport is the glorification of the body, there is therefor a standing and obvious conflict as deep and as old as the species itself.

The moment a technique and a tool became a force to rival something you were given at birth is the moment that war began and it’s been an evolutionary arms race ever since.

“Google “student athlete” and you’ll come up with over 7,000,000 hits.”

And putting “football rape” in Google yields About 9,470,000 results. So what?

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1857059&page=1

Is Jock Culture a Training Ground for Crime?
Studies Find College Athletes More Likely to Commit Sexual Assault

Save your Jocks make great role models speech for the sponsors and scouts.

The fact of the matter is training the body by definition neglects the mind, and there is a well known correlation between muscle mass and testosterone and testosterone and violent behavior. This makes evolutionary sense.

“So, I suppose 2/5ths is a “good portion”, but read as a proportion of student population, less than 1% of students are punished in any physical way in schools.”

Trivialize it all you want. (Would you hand over 2/5ths of your gross income to me if its such an inconsequential figure? I thought not. How about to a charity of your choosing if it’s just me you hate?)

Ironically you bring up “in any physical way.” How many coaches make their kids run laps or the like for infractions? Regardless. The fact remains we literally knock children into line. Your profession is reprehensible to me. Your negligence and incompetence (as a whole career path) is legendary and would not be tolerated were it not so darn useful for the state. And yes 2/5ths is goddamn too many.

Carlin summed it up nicely.

“As far as schools “beat children,” I’m not sure what your definition of “beat” is, but in my district, the largest in Colorado, simply grabbing or hitting a student will get you fired quickly. It simply is not tolerated at all and everybody knows it.”

Good. When that becomes true nationally, public and private, then we can talk.

“I suppose that schools will always lag behind the technology curve to some extent, but to say that it’s “usefulness… is called into question” is absurd. ”

Oh really?

Start at 40 seconds. See also 3:20. (If you can’t sit through the whole 5 minutes.)

You have no idea what you’re dealing with. And to think that you are in a position to instruct children who will outlive you on how to survive the world THEY’LL live in is what’s absurd.

“And I don’t think that you have “established” anything except your ignorance of current educational practices and trends.”

Well in my original piece I wasn’t try to establish much. The current educational practices are trivia. I know because I still can’t take a net connected laptop with me to my tests. (Can I?) It’s headline news when a school anywhere in the world even tinkers with such a thing. The school system actually still thinks using a machine is CHEATING. What are we, Amish?

People think the government is bad about catching up, jesus, schools are a billion times worse.

“Do you understand the weight of categorical statements?”

Do you understand the power of exponential growth? The whole concept of a 12 year long (minimum, the average is higher) education program is lunacy in the context of today let alone 12 years from now. You want to talk about whats steadily falling? Let’s talk about the value of an associates degree.

“Again, where do you get this data?”

I’m not going to play the absolute citation game with you because some things are obvious. And if you want to reject water being wet until there is a definitive recent study on the subject I can’t help you.

http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/usa/US-Government-Agencies-Propose-Spending-Hundreds-of-Millions-of-Dollars-on-Math-and-Science-Educational-Programs-93298309.html

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/06/spending-on-sports-vs-spending-on-teaching/

http://www.edlotterman.com/RWE/Articles/20020523Sports.htm

I don’t think anyone is going to accuse the United States football spending as “Lagging behind.”

If you think we spend as much on chess club as we do on football you need a lengthy run of anti-psychotics.

In public schools which get purchased more often? New jerseys or new science books? Please. The science books wear out faster.

“a whopping 98.6% of its budget on things like staffing, facilities, transportation”

Is the football field not a facility? Is the coach not staff? Is the bus to and from games not transportation? The actual cost of sport is notoriously difficult to calculate. Besides, this is just one school and it’s not even a third party audit.

“As far as I know, work is not “compulsory” as the unemployed in this country would be happy to point out. / But even then, nobody is coerced into going to work.”

Wow. School really is its own little world. Work absolutely is compulsory in this country unless you are lucky enough to have been born with a trust fund. We live in a capitalist society that lauds the rich via some Horatio Alger inspired ethos of pluck and determination for having had the ability to amass wealth, despite the fact that most of the time they were born with a good chunk of it anyway.

Class mobility in this country is largely a myth. Even lottery winners self destruct a lot of the time since the system is so caustic to “new money.” We routinely blame homeless people for being homeless as if they are all drug addicts, but the thing is drug addicts typically aren’t homeless because they can buy and sell drugs when they’re aren’t in jail or in some way being supported by the state which refuses to confront the drug problem on the basis of what it actually is. A public health issue, not a criminal justice issue.

We routinely throw men in jail when they can’t pay child support regardless of the economic situation. We routinely deny disability claims with the assertion that no no, you’re well enough to work despite having no requirement to produce proof that such theoretical jobs exist much less are available.

You don’t even know how unemployment is calculated do you. Are you aware that people without jobs are not always counted as unemployed? I leave that for you to explore.

Saying work in America isn’t compulsory is exactly like saying food isn’t compulsory.

Sure, if I don’t mind starving.

” It doesn’t have to be a public or even a private school. Parents may home school or register their children into virtual schools at any point therein, so no child has to go to a building with dozens or hundreds of others if the parents don’t want them to.”

http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1331/Children-America-WORKING-PARENTS-CHILD-CARE.html

The reality of the situation is that children are hostages of the state. The only people that actually have the options you mention are the rich or the disappearing middle class. Though I hope that’s changing.

We live in a culture that shits itself with indignant shock when a parent so much as let’s her son ride the subway alone.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=son+rides+subway+alone

The idea of being unschooled is novel if not illegal and almost certainly inviable in most places in the United States. And you want to know why? See the Carlin video above.

“You expect a sovereign nation to act against its own interests? Really?”

I see semantics isn’t your strong suit either. And you rag on me for false dichotomy.

Note that I said “DOES NOTHING BUT.”

A state is more than capable of acting in its own interests IN ADDITION to the interests of its citizens from time to time. Our state does no such thing, EVERY action it takes from the war in Iraq to the social security system is made to forward one of it’s aims. Aid to us is incidental. It routinely attacks anything which could forward the needs of its people if it stands to incur even a minor loss of power or money.

Drug war, nuff said.

“So far you’ve shown nothing that would verify this.”

See above. The whole concept of a centrally regimented education system is a fools errand as much as a planned economy is.

*lowering dropout stats*

What exactly does that prove? Heh, we accredit colleges to prevent diploma mills on the grounds that infinitely high graduation rates indicate worthless education. Educators (math fetishists in particular) routinely bemoan the rising graduation rates as a SYMPTOM OF the broken education system. Looked at that way your stats actually back my point.

“Again, give us your evidence and not your cynicism. In the Denver Public School system, where my children attend and enjoy school, students overwhelmingly enjoy school. 82% “like going to school most days.”

Please. Setting aside Stockholm syndrome… They are children, and they have absolutely no basis for comparison. You might as well ask your inside cat how it likes being confined to your house. Put simply it doesn’t know any better. Our society treats children as property, and they by virtue of recent birth simply aren’t equipped to know what they are missing. And by the time they are adults, they no longer have a choice. Hell the entirely of a child’s data stream is censored anyway. God forbid they should hear naughty words or see genitals. *Victorian gasp of shock.*

I am one of the few that will speak out about children’s rights (like to the point of letting them vote) and I am universally scorned for it. Jesus man we can’t even make it illegal to hit them. We’re literally better to prisoners (in theory) than we are our own children we’re never in a governmental sense going to give them the freedom to to opt out of “education”.

True freedom will come for them only when technology obviates the state. So long as the state exists, children will be second class citizens.

Your polls are like asking Iranian women how they feel about burqa laws with their husbands in the room.

“Where do you come up with this?”

Logic. Another class you don’t teach. The needs of the individual conflict by definition with the needs of the state, that’s why we have a state. It’s called a common good problem and central structures have been required to mediate them since agriculture was invented.

Watch the bbc show connections for a fascinating exploration of that process.

Every other element of the social contract from property rights to protection from assault (for adults anyway) stems from this basic truth. The individual is caustic to the state. Education either empowers the individual, the child in this case, or it empowers the state by fashioning the child into an adult of a desired type.

Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that your goal as a teacher and parent is NOT to produce in principal a socially adjusted adult? Sure your motivation may be benevolent, you may want “a good life” for “your” children, but the fact is, without that influence they may becomes something completely different than you were expecting, and is that unexpectedness not a threat?

Wake up. Your job is to churn out workers.

“I’m going to guess that you’re an advocate of individualism, because again there is a false dichotomy given here. Either/or, this/that, good/bad. You know, there’s a lot of gray in life.”

Indeed I am. And that’s a pretty phrase but its sadly untrue. Any precise statement is either true or false. the only gray is in our perception of it. Or put another way, rational minds can not agree to disagree on objective subjects.

To whatever degree you impose the state view on your children by definition you harm who they otherwise would have been via opportunity cost. And we don’t know that full cost because any individual can be a black swan event. Or put another way we don’t know what we don’t know. This goes back to what I was saying about not being able to imagine a world without football in schools.

A band of individuals will always respond faster than a monolithic system unless that system is so interconnected it ends up being a singular organism. Thats the argument behind capitalism isn’t it? Individual action adding up to a more efficient whole than a centrally planned economy? The whole Invisible Hand is faster than the eye routine?

“That was some convoluted reasoning. Hitting = torture, but some think hitting is good. Sports=harm (torture), so those that think hitting is good will think sports (torture) is good. Ergo, hitting=torture=harm=sports=non-deviant behavior. Huh?”

You have two options, either you are straw manning me or you fail to understand. Neither of which bode well for your defenses. Typing “huh” is not an argument. Brow beating and implication of scorn might get you far in a building full of captive middle school students but not with me. Ask a complete precise question, and get an answer of the like in turn.

Sorry I can’t make it simple and complete at the same time. Some data just can’t be further compressed without loss of fidelity.and of course I may simply lack the ability to compress it further even if it is possible.

“How did religion get in the argument?”

Because religion’s primary usefulness is its production of oblivious homogeneous persons. Just like education with it’s sports program intact. Agriculture made the product of the rank and file a requirement. Religion did it for most of humanity’s history. Recently education has stepped up as religion began to fail in that role.

“Cannot individuals gain personally from sports while also helping the team?”

In theory sure. But I can also learn a great deal about myself and come away a stronger person as a result of a heroin addiction. (I can provide a bevy of authors musicians and artists who have.) That does not mean we’re going to pass out H in gym class. The point is finding what is good in general for people. (Children are people.)

“The cross-country runner that tries to make a personal best each time she runs?”

Please. We don’t crowd around the TV watching cross country runners. We don’t spend 70 billion a year (http://www.sgma.com/press/3_U.S.-Sports-Industry%3A-Nearly-a-$70-Billion-Business) on cross country runners. (Its distressingly difficult to get a solid cumulative estimate of the size of the sports industry in America broken down by sport.) But this should help you out. http://www.sportsuntapped.com/the-15-highest-paid-nfl-players-in-2010-will-probably-surprise-you-111260/

You know what she’s not doing while she’s running like a hamster in a wheel? Helping humanity. The pledge-a-thon activity you’re about to mention is not fair because its an arbitrary payment. The doner could obviously donate without a runner.

“The football player that perseveres through pain and exhaustion to gain a starting position and a sense of success and completion?”

Go bust ass with habitat for humanity, the body doesn’t know the difference. Note you said “a sense of” not a reality of. Sure sports feel good, we’re made to fight, men especially. Built on apes remember? The question is the potential for good, and the reality of our lives as thinking organisms in a dynamic setting that is full of stuff constantly trying to eat us.

Sports is a great big festering neon distraction. (Yeah. Tool. What of it.) The price we pay for organized state sponsored football is WAY WAY WAY too high in every objective or ethical sense.

“Didn’t he just help himself and his team?”

He only helped himself in the sense that you convinced him the team’s well being IS his well being or you paid him in some way. That’s cheating. If I pay someone to do virtually anything obviously its good for them in the sense that I paid them. That does not mean the action itself is somehow rendered good. Indeed history is replete with horrific paid acts.

“The Susan G. Komen Race For the Cure has raised over $180 million dollars that has gone to research grants to end cancer.”

Ooooo and maybe if we weren’t spending 70 billion a year on sports equipment we’d have a full blown cure by now. Setting aside the fact that charity itself has issues. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g )

“This is bad? Tell me how this is bad.”

Two words. Opportunity cost.

The appraisal of the value of any thing must include the value of what is lost by having it. What does having this thing cost us? What does this thing’s existence prevent from existing?

Let’s drop the money from the Iraq/Afghan war and all sports spending into cancer research for a single year, and see what happens. They probably couldn’t even spend it all in the same year.

“…was off the mark on many points, only some of which I cited.”

By all means do the rest. Think of it as loyalty to your profession or if you have an open mind a rational testing of your logical resolve. Your children’s future is at stake after all. Given the principals of cognitive dissonance and post purchase rationalization, how likely are you, really, to admit an error if I am unequivocally correct?

” I’m not throwing it out the window.”

It’ll go out the window without your throw, the only question is how many kids are still in seats when it goes. There is a better way. And it’s on its way whether we’re ready or not.

“Most of our country’s populace was educated by public schools and we still are the most productive nation in the world. ”

By what standard? Our chief exports are trash and weapons. Weapons economically are negative in value, they destroy themselves, bombs explode, bullets fire, jets burn fuel. Etc. Did you read 1984? You must have. Just what do we produce? Even our entertainment is falling in value. Did you see how many awesome non American movies there were between 2000 and now? Man, we’re getting schooled out there. (pun intended)

“Sports can do children a great deal of good physically, emotionally, and psychologically while also having them interact with others. ”

And it can also destroy their bodies, distract them from important issues, and their own minds, give them body fixations, encourage sexism (cheer-leading is about as empowering as a money shot, not to mention jailbait fuel), and later on tear their ego apart. And as for interaction, they would do that anyway if we left them alone. And I hardly think slamming into some kid from the next country over is a meaningful interaction. I’d rather have them chat on myspace.

“This can be within the larger school setting or outside of it, but either way this is not necessarily bad. ”

Well, I guess we just disagree. And only one of us is right. The fact is our bodies are temporary and I don’t mean that in some mythical religious way I mean in time we’ll shed them like we did our tails. Some people almost already have. Hawking for example. That brilliant man effectively doesn’t even have a body and while he would I assume prefer one again he gets along with out one to our collective benefit.

I expect to spend my deep future in a sphere (yup, like in Phantasm) that manipulates its surroundings via surrogates. I hate my body, it’s a huge threat to my brain. Very few deaths percentage wise are caused by brain error. (setting aside behavior) The brain is extremely durable, it doesn’t even feel pain directly did you know that?

Sports embrace the body, they cultivate a visceral dopamine addiction. An instant gratification attitude that by definition costs the future. Sports cause all sorts of long term injuries and any health benefits are often temporary in the long run. From destroyed skeletons to brain damage to overt permanent sporting injury, in general anything that causes people to forcefully and repeatedly collide with each other or objects is a bad thing. That’s why they wear armor and padding. Even your cross country runner is going to have a bad back and knees probably.

“Do some kids hate school? Yes, of course. Do most? No.”

And you’re willing to sacrifice those that do. I’m not. Whatever theoretical good sports can do it absolutely does not warrant a state mandate. Your crap about the whole thing being voluntary is just that. You know even I tried out for the basketball team as a 3rd grader. You think that was a choice?

I don’t blame you for not understanding. You were a child once, you probably never had the chance either. By the time you got around to choosing your choices were already made just like the rest of us. Hell the whole western concept of a choice needs to be examined. Philosophy, another thing they don’t teach in school.

http://underlore.com/TBA/?p=558 And I’m not just bitching. I have some solutions.

“I spent a lot of time researching and writing this so I could attache background citations. Please do the same with yours. Making off the cuff remarks based on your opinions and assigning them a factual stance is irresponsible writing and thinking. ”

I spent about 4 hours on this reply I spend about that time on all my lengthy posts. I agree completely but there is a line between demanding citation and looking for an excuse to disbelieve as a result of vested interest. Careful which side of that line you are on.